In Chapter 9, Alima and the other women's questioning forces the men to admit the situational irony that in the United States, the women with the most children have the least access to domestic help and vice versa:
“How many children do your women have?” Alima had her notebook out now, and a rather firm set of lip. Terry began to dodge.
“There is no set number, my dear,” he explained. “Some have more, some have less.”
“Some have none at all,” I put in mischievously.
They pounced on this admission and soon wrung from us the general fact that those women who had the most children had the least servants, and those who had the most servants had the least children.
The men have just been describing the gendered division of labor in their society. They tell Alima and the others that women do not work outside the home, instead managing the household and raising children. The Herlandians, who take motherhood and childhood education very seriously, are startled to hear that raising children is considered a small enough job that mothers can do it while also keeping house. Terry's explanation that servants help with all the work does not satisfy the Herlandians. Soon, they learn that the most wealthy women have access to both birth control and domestic servants. The poorer a woman is, the less access she has to either of these resources. As a result, poor women are expected to care for more children with less help.
This system is ironic when the men spell it out like this. It sounds especially upsetting to the Herlandians because their entire society is organized around the mission of raising children to be good citizens, a project they treat as sacred. They believe every child should have access to the best collective resources society has to offer. Under the system the men describe, the children of rich parents receive a disproportionate amount of the child-rearing resources (a tale that is still familiar today). Meanwhile, for poor women, motherhood is a burden they are forced to bear without help. This prevents motherhood from being the sacred, sought-after role it is in Herland.
The Herlandians often use logos as they question the men about how things work in their society, destabilizing the men's sense that their way of things is right. In Chapter 11, when Van tells Ellador about the role of sex in married couples' lives, Van (the narrator) responds to her logos with verbal irony:
“It develops love,” I explained. “All the power of beautiful permanent mated love comes through this higher development.”
“Are you sure?” she asked gently. “How do you know that it was so developed? There are some birds who love each other so that they mope and pine if separated, and never pair again if one dies, but they never mate except in the mating season. Among your people do you find high and lasting affection appearing in proportion to this indulgence?”
It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.
Ellador is skeptical that sex develops a permanent kind of love that has nothing to do with parenting children. She gives the example of monogamous birds that only mate during the mating season to produce offspring. Van's people would be anomalies in nature, she points out, if they need sex in order to bond with one another. She is willing to believe that that is the case, but the way she poses the question undermines some of the beliefs Van has previously taken for granted. He knows that sex and love do not always exist in proportion to one another, so now he is left wondering what exactly their relationship is in his society.
Rather than fully admitting his own shortcomings, Van jokes that, "It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind." This is an example of verbal irony. Explicitly, he is complaining about the burden of being a smart, logical person. He is complimenting his own mind. Beneath that compliment, however, is an indirect admission that Ellador's logical mind has bested his own. It is "awkward" not only that she has presented him with logic that forces him to reevaluate his assumptions, but also that she has done so as a woman. He comes from a society that stereotypes men as logical and women as emotional. Here, though, Ellador has broken that stereotype and proven herself to be (at least sometimes) better at logic than her husband.
